Posts tagged with: Fossil fuel

It is perhaps no coincidence that Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, a radical environmentalist who had a part in drafting the encyclical, is a member of the Club of Rome. Schellnhuber was apparently selected for this role by Archbishop Marcelo Sanchez Sorondo, the head of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Fossil fuel advocates are criticizing Pope Francis’ recent climate encyclical, claiming his call to phase out fossil fuels will harm the poor by preventing access to electricity and keeping them in “energy poverty.” But fossil fuels are not economically viable in most of the communities that suffer from a lack of electricity, and on-the-ground experts have explained that distributed renewable energy sources are often a more effective way to lift the world’s impoverished — who will be most affected by the adverse impacts of climate change — out of energy poverty.

Nonetheless, it is important to comprehend that Pope Francis intends to raise public awareness about the forthcoming perils in case the indispensible precautions are not taken now; it very effectively goes beyond religion and addresses the entire global population to adopt ‘changes in lifestyle, production and consumption’.

It could be argued that Exxon is actually an energy company, but it’s still an energy company that knows where its bread is buttered. Oil and gas is the winning game for this company, not solar.

Thus wrote Jeff Siegel this week on the Energy & Capitalwebsite. Siegel was referring to Exxon Mobil Corporation’s thumping of shareholder resolutions by As You Sow, the Interfaith Center for Corporate Responsibility and other religious groups intended to push ExxonMobil into naming an environmental scientist to the board and issue a report on the environmental impact of the company’s hyraulic-fracturing operations. Another study to be pitched on the growing pile of fracking reports issued regularly by industry and regulators?

Siegel is as clearheaded a liberal writer as I’ve come across on these matters. He writes:

Again, I don’t see the benefit here for shareholders.

Those who oppose fracking have plenty of this data, anyway. So to mandate such a report seems like a waste of time, particularly if the report indicates no negative side effects. You think anyone who opposes fracking would believe anything included in that report?

Shareholder resolutions intended to force Exxon Mobil Corp. and Chevron Corp. to adopt greenhouse gas reduction goals and name environmental experts (i.e. any scientist who believes human activity causes climate change) to their respective board of directors were defeated last week. Not only were they defeated, they were crushed. Chevron shareholders mustered only 9 percent support for GHG reductions and 20 percent for the environmentalist board member. Eighty percent of ExxonMobil shareholders rejected the additional board member, and only 10 percent voted for reducing GHG emissions.

Naturally, such progressive outlets as The Guardian sympathetically reported the proposals by touting the highly anticipated climate-change encyclical of Pope Francis, which is epected later this month. Of course, few outside the Vatican know exactly what the Pope will say in the document, but the Guardian goes so far as to draw a connection between the ExxonMobil and Chevron resolutions and the Pope. Readers are led to conclude that shareholders (As You Sow, the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility and the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment, among others) introducing the shareholder resolutions represent all Catholics. (more…)

Every year on Earth Day events are held around the globe to demonstrate support for environmental protection. You aren’t likely to see any celebrations of fossil fuels, though, despite all the ways they have improved the environment for human life and flourishing. As Alex Epstein says, maybe we should reflect more on how fossil fuels has made our environment cleaner and healthier.

Earth Day has arrived once again, and all those nasty predictions about the environment made since the inaugural event in 1970 have yet to pass. In fact, many of the threats themselves have passed entirely. The population bomb never exploded, the Earth didn’t experience another Ice Age and we’ve managed to avoid a Malthusian dystopia. In fact, we’re doing quite well, thank you very much. Mother Earth is cleaner while, at the same time, the planet’s population living in poverty has been halved within the past two decades.

Try telling that to Home Box Office’s Real Time host Bill Maher, who calls arguments from climate-change skeptics “Zombie Lies.” The man who grants himself absolution for his own carbon footprint because he drives an electric vehicle, delivered an epic rant against Republicans, the Koch brothers and the oil industry this past week on his program’s “New Rules” segment. Republican politicians and aspirants, reasons Maher, are only skeptical regarding climate change because they’re bought-and-paid for by donations from the fossil-fuel industry.

Maher, of course, is free to believe (or, infamously, not to believe when it comes to matters requiring religious faith) anything he wishes, but a certain logical consistency is lacking. While he berates the oil and gas industries and Republican politicians, and smugly drives a rechargeable electric vehicle (apparently, one assumes, recharged from an energy source derived from fossil fuels), the clip linked above stops just prior to Maher announcing personal appearances in cities far away from Los Angeles, Calif. (more…)

The fossil-fuel sustainability and divestment movements began with colleges and universities. Over the past two years, the movements have gained momentum from faith-based activists intent on stranding oil, coal and natural gas in the ground. At the same time, they’re pressing their religious communities to endorse impossible fossil fuel reduction goals.

Progressives in the sustainability and divestment movements must assume that if Big Oil is brought to heel, then Big Renewable will immediately fill the void. Never mind that there exists nothing today to replace the growing need for oil, coal and natural gas. Will we one day have an efficient and affordable replacement? Not if we bankrupt advanced, technologically rich economies with sustainability policies.

Additionally, mounting evidence suggests that sustainability efforts in the academic industry, which includes fossil-fuel divestment, have inflicted economic harm on colleges and universities (and taxpayers) without providing a scintilla of benefit for the environment.

Forget the candy hearts, chocolate, the local Cineplex and bistro this weekend. St. Valentine’s Day somehow has been hijacked by Global Disinvestment Day, which means you should protest fossil fuels and encourage shareholders to submit proxy resolutions to leave oil, coal and gas resources untapped. Your significant others are guaranteed to love it because … Gaia.

Behind this movement are nominally religious shareholder activists such as As You Sow, as well as the World Council of Churches, filmdom’s The Hulk (Mark Ruffalo) and extreme-environmentalist rabble rousers Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein. Figuring out the endgame of divestment advocates isn’t difficult – Naomi Klein laid it all out for us in a recent interview in Grist:

Another point I would make, [about] carbon pricing, is that when we make the argument that this is a rogue sector, that their business plan is at odds with life on earth, we are creating an intellectual and political space where it becomes much easier to tax those profits, to increase royalties, and even to nationalize these companies. This is not just about the fact that we want to separate ourselves from these companies, it’s also that we have a right to those profits. If those profits are so illegitimate that Harvard shouldn’t be invested in them, they’re also so illegitimate that taxpayers have a right to them to pay for a transition away from fossil fuels, and to pay the bills for a crisis created by this sector. It’s not just about dissociating ourselves from their profits, but potentially getting a much larger piece of them. [emphases added]

I grew up with the attitude that wealth was measured by whether the sun was shining and the fish were biting and whether my belly was full and the family larder stocked with canned vegetables and fruit as well as fresh meat and poultry raised on our tiny 80-acre farm in Michigan. To quote Dylan Thomas: “And the sabbath rang slowly / In the pebbles of the holy streams.” Certainly there were items and conditions we desired, desires often unmet but with little or no detriment to my siblings and me. When one of us would watch a TV commercial, and lament the absence of any given material possession in our respective lives, our mother would tell us: “If ifs and buts were fudge and nuts we’d all have a Merry Christmas.” For his part, dad would say: “If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”

These phrases also hold true when applied to the repeated proxy shareholder resolutions of the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility. If both my parents still were alive, and the figurative Fern Hill of my youth once again in their possession, I’d suggest to the religious investors of ICCR hold a retreat on the premises. My parents could’ve instructed the good nuns and clergy that their “ifs and buts” and “wishes” related to reducing carbon emissions, if successful, would make energy beggars of us all, reduced to riding horses or bicycles.

Although recent reports indicate U.S. households will spend an estimated average $550 less on gasoline in 2015, ICCR seems to say while endeavoring to drive up energy costs by demanding economically indefensible measures. Among ICCR’s current efforts is backing the Environmental Protection Agency’s proposed Clean Power Plan, which aims to cut 30 percent of emissions by electric power plants. (more…)

U.S. households are projected to save an estimated average $550 on gasoline in 2015. According to U.S. Energy Information Administration’s Short Term Energy Outlook, “The average household will spend about $1,962 on gasoline in 2015, the first time that average will have fallen below $2,000 in five years.” Readers as well may assume the likelihood that falling fuel prices will exert some type of downward pressure on food and other commodity prices, which will be cheaper to bring to market.

By any realistic measure, this is great news for the United States in general and for the struggling lower middle class and poverty-stricken specifically. To those for whom reality is somewhat more elusive, however, it’s a travesty. Unfortunately, some of these individuals are advocating against the use of fossil fuels at cross purposes with their religious vocations. For example, nine bishops representing The Latin American Bishops Conference, the Symposium of Episcopal Conferences of Africa and Madagascar, the Federation of Asian Bishops Conferences and the French and Brazilian bishop’s conferences called for ceasing the use of fossil fuels: “We express an answer to what is considered God’s appeal to take action on the urgent and damaging situation of global climate warming.” (more…)

Ever-anxious to put another corporate head on a pike, religious proxy shareholders are boasting that their efforts landed them the big daddy of them all – ExxonMobil. Religious investor group As You Sow pats itself on the back that the energy company bowed to its pressure to reveal hydraulic fracturing (fracking) risks. According to the Wall Street Journal’s Daniel Gilbert:

Exxon Mobil Corp. agreed to publicly disclose more details on the risks of hydraulic fracturing of oil and gas wells, reversing a long-held resistance after negotiations with environmental groups and investors.

The Texas oil company’s decision is the latest evidence of a shift by Exxon’s top executives to address growing environmental worries about fracking, a contentious technique in some North American communities. (more…)